Mary Frances Thérèse Raftery

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Mary Frances Thérèse Raftery, (born Dec. 21, 1957, Dublin, Ire.—died Jan. 10, 2012, Dublin), Irish investigative journalist who exposed the systematic physical, emotional, and sexual abuse of children in institutions run by the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland. Raftery’s documentaries for Ireland’s state-owned RTÉ television revealed the suffering of children at the hands of many Roman Catholic nuns and priests and the subsequent cover-up by church officials and thereby triggered public anger as well as formal investigations by the Irish authorities. In States of Fear (1999), she uncovered the abusive treatment of poor and abandoned children in state-financed church-run “industrial” schools. Raftery’s revelations led to the creation of the Residential Institutions Redress Board to compensate the injured children and to the establishment of the government Ryan Commission, which issued its final, scathing report in May 2009. Her documentary Cardinal Secrets (2002) was an investigation into child sex abuse by priests in the Dublin archdiocese and led to the government’s Commission of Investigation Act (2004) and the Murphy Commission, which released its report in late 2009. In Behind the Walls (2011), Raftery reported on the people who were not mentally ill but in the 1950s were involuntarily committed by the state to psychiatric hospitals; these included “promiscuous” young women or those deemed “inconvenient” by their families. Raftery more fully explored the industrial schools scandal in her book Suffer the Little Children (1999) and her play No Escape (2010). In June 2011, while undergoing cancer treatment, Raftery publicly called on the Irish government to more fully investigate and apologize for the decades of abusive treatment suffered by young women detained in the church-run Magdalene laundries, the last of which closed in 1996.